Elsewhere, Netflix measures average streaming bandwidth and concludes that (unsurprisingly) Google Fibre is the fastest ISP in the west, with Verizon FiOS a creditable second. AT&T’s FTTC solution, Uverse, is well down the list and not even that much better than their bog standard DSL.

And Dan Rayburn takes apart AT&T’s deal with Akamai. For a while at least, it means that AT&T will have three different CDN products and won’t even be rid of the original one that’s never made them a penny. From Akamai’s point of view, though, it means they get to deploy on AT&T’s network, and they’re willing to pay for that.

Two stories the UK’s 4G auction is finally on its way, with deposits required last week. The usual four suspects were on the start line, plus another: BT. Meanwhile, DTAG has announced a €30bn investment plan for the next three years, with €6bn for additional FTTC in Germany and €4bn for LTE at T-Mobile USA. As a result, they’re cutting their dividend, and the German government is looking at ways to boost its financing. One option would be a rights issue, with the government and its KfW public investment bank subscribing for shares. Another would be for the government and KfW to forgo a dividend on their stakes.

The Netherlands had a spectrum auction this week, and it was rather more expensive than expected, at €3.8bn. The 3G & 4G Wireless Blog has a useful chart detailing the spectrum position. For the first time, Tele2 acquired its own spectrum, with 2x10MHz blocks in the 800s and 2600s.

KPN announced it was cutting its dividend after spending €1.35bn on spectrum and facing a new competitor. They also sold a Spanish MVNO to Orange.

Bouygues says it will launch LTE in the new year, if only the government would let it refarm its 1800MHz block. The application has been with ARCEP since July, and by law, the regulator must answer within 8 months, so deadline day is the 1st of April. Although France Telecom has done the same in the UK with EE, they may not be so keen at home, as Free wants any spectrum released by refarming to be divvied up afresh.

Here’s a closely reported piece on a major Facebook advertising campaign, for Wal-Mart over Black Friday. If this is anything to go by, their strategy is to concentrate on big projects for big brands, with Facebook providing a lot of consulting, data, and technical assistance. This will use a lot of Facebook resources for each deal, and suggests that the company is turning into an ad agency.

They also published the top 10 Google + hash tags so far, compared with the top 10 trending memes on Facebook. Google’s are, predictably, rather serious, although perhaps the interesting story here is that both Google and Facebook have borrowed ideas from Twitter, hashtags and trending respectively.

Interestingly, Horace points out that Samsung has pursued the opposite strategy. Rather than doing a prototype, then a pilot, and then handing the project off to a contract manufacturer, Samsung tends to let the first movers jump, monitor the results, and then pour its own capital into pursuing the opportunity, on the principle that capital-intensive products are hardest to replicate. (Mind you, this didn’t stop a hideous bug emerging in some phones.)

He also looks at capital investment across the industry more broadly. Interestingly, perhaps the simplest explanation of this chart is that Apple is becoming a component company, like Samsung: